The Revolution Will Be Crowdsourced (and Cute)

Here at the Book Bench, we’re big believers in the whole a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words thing, so we’re totally into a new project called Emoji Dick. Emoji are the souped-up emoticons used in Japanese texting—smiley faces, hearts, hypodermic needles. Fred Benenson, a research associate at Eyebeam, is using them to translate the entirety of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” To wit:

Benenson launched Emoji Dick via Kickstarter, an online funding platform—depending on their investment level, contributors will be rewarded with anything from a PDF of the book to a signed limited-edition color hardcover—and he has twenty-five more days to reach his goal of $3,500. Most of that money will go the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers who will each translate one of the book’s six thousand four hundred and thirty-eight sentences three times. Another set of workers will vote on the sentences, and the best ones will be included in the book.

You’re asking: Why? So were we. We e-mailed Benenson.

No, seriously—why?

I’m interested in the phenomenon of how our language, communications, and culture are influenced by digital technology. Emoji are either a low point or a high point in that story, so I felt I could confront a lot of our shared anxieties about the future of human expression (see: Twitter or text messages) by forcing a great work of literature through such a strange new filter.

Out of all the books out there, why “Moby-Dick”?

First, I needed a public domain book that I could get the plain-text version of easily. The Bible seemed too obvious. I then wanted something very large and long, so that I could demonstrate the scale possible with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “Moby-Dick” seemed to fit those criteria, so I just went for it, and assigned the first couple chapters as a test run. The results were fantastic. I then realized that the story behind “Moby-Dick” is about this huge, seemingly insurmountable challenge, told using metaphors and stylized language, and in a way, that’s what translating a book into emoji is—a weird, huge challenge told in metaphors and stylized language.

I also really like the whale emoji, so that seemed like a good fit, too.

Cell-phone novels are huge in Japan, but do you know of any other emoji books? It seems like you’re the only one out there.

As far as I know (and I’ve asked a couple Japanese friends), no one has tried publishing a novel in emoji. However, there are many collections of funny one-off sentences that seem to be floating around.

I go back and forth on whether or not I’ll succeed. I really don’t know, and I can’t predict the future, but it’s certainly going to be an interesting month.